Publisher Tips – Deciding on a new market

You’ve got a great idea for a new site, and you feel really passionate about it. That’s great. Enthusiasm about an idea can be essential for success in performance marketing. However, sometimes passion about a site is not enough to make money. On occasions you will just want to run some of your sites as a hobby and nothing more, and that is fine. But it is important to know from the get go, which website ideas have a big potential for making affiliate money and which ones don’t.

How many people are searching for phrases or words relating to your website idea? Use Google Keyword Planner to get stats on the number of searches for a given term per month and Google Trends to compare between terms. Although, the terms or themes that are searched for the most aren’t always the best ones to go after. Sometimes the competition levels for these terms will be too high.

2) Look at competition levels

Be careful of entering in to industries where large established sites already have the power. If you want to start up a niche comparison site, then you don’t want to be competing with the likes of comparethemarket.com and moneysupermarket.com, for example. Always do a search on Google to see who your competitors would be, and have a look at the CPC (cost per click) of your target phrases or terms on Google Keyword Tool

3) Will people want to purchase the products which I include on the site?

Even once you have found a great niche, with a fair amount of searches but a low amount of competition, you then need to have a think about why the competition levels are low. One such reason might be because it is very hard to make money from a topic area. Have a think from the beginning whether the things that you are going to be talking about, are the kinds of things which people are likely to buy online.

If you have any more questions about traffic acquisition for your site, contact our Publisher Services team.